This invention relates to telephone supporting devices for use in a hospital, nursing home, convalescent home, or sickroom. The invention is more particularly concerned with devices for holding a one-piece telephone instrument and which are mountable on a bed rail or similar structure.
Hospital patients who are confined to bed are often provided with telephone service at the bedside. Telephone instruments can be standard or miniature desk sets placed on a bedside table, or can be unitary or one-piece instruments, sometimes called handset phones, placed in a telephone holder near the bed.
Patients' access to bedside telephones is often hindered by the presence of bed rails, which are necessary to keep the patient from inadvertently rolling out of bed. One previous proposal to address this problem appears in U.S. Pat. No. 4,431,154. That patent relates to a telephone holder for mounting on the bed rail for holding a telephone of the Trimline type. The holder hangs from the upper rail only, and holds the telephone instrument horizontally, with the base portion of the instrument reposed in a receptacle formed on the holder, and the handset portion resting on the base. Special slots are required to accommodate the line cord and the handset cord.
These bed rail telephone holders have been somewhat difficult to use. The telephone is difficult for a motion-impaired patient to reach and pick up, because using the instrument generally involves reaching over the bed rail and then reaching down below the rail to pick up the handset or to put it back.